Péter Zollman (Budapest, June 14[1][2] 1931[3] – Bristol, December 3, 2013) was a Hungarian-born scientist, research physicist, engineer, inventor and translator of literary works.
He attended Berzsenyi Dániel High School (where he met George Soros and George Klein), then to the Budapest University of Technology: first as a general engineer, then as a weak-current electrical engineer at the Faculty of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering (where he worked as a demonstrator at Charles Simonyi's department for two years). He then worked at United Incandescent Lamp and Electricity Company (he met Zoltán Lajos Bay there), where he also produced microwave tubes, klystrons, and travelling-wave tubes for radar equipment; he was appointed head of department there.
At the end of November 1956 he left Hungary and moved to London. Dennis Gabor read a publication of his and, on the basis of it, offered him a research position in his laboratory, where he was working on the development of the flat television picture tube – he was aided in that by an invention of Zollman's, which he expounded in his doctoral thesis. He then joined a mechanical engineering company as a development engineer and even became its manager, but he sought a different challenge: he became the technical manager of a huge British global company active in a wide range of fields, from banknote printing, creating banknote- and cheque-printing machines to semiconductors and household appliances.
He went on to work on remote control of tunnelling and mining machinery, including the large electron-proton collider at CERN near Geneva and the Channel Tunnel, but his equipment was also used in the Soviet Union on hundreds of tunnels for the Baikal–Amur Mainline. Their designs and products were sold in America, Germany, France and Japan. Correcting any possible mistake afterwards would have been extremely difficult and expensive, and could have ruined their company, so they had to strive for perfection. In the course of his work, he was able to negotiate in four languages, by his account, thanks to his upbringing in Hungary, although it was in England where he learned French. More than a hundred of his patents have been known to the world.[4]
In 1993, after a sudden epiphany, he gave up the active management of his company and started translating poetry, essentially because he wanted to make Hungarian poetry accessible to his non-Hungarian-speaking daughters. He felt that there were very few translations that made Hungarian poetry accessible to English speakers, so as a trial he first translated Mihály Babits' poem The Danaïds, which he admitted he did with relative ease and good results. In the years that followed, he translated hundreds of more serious poems, mainly those in which formal accuracy was important. He found that form was important in Hungarian poetry, more so than in English poetry, for instance. As he wrote: "translating Hungarian poetry is such a pleasure that it gilds my life."
George Klein, in a study of Attila József in Pietà (ISBN 9780262111614), quoted the opening lines of the poem My Homeland as untranslatable into any other language.[5] Zollman translated them in more than forty forms, hoping that one of them will turn out really beautiful.[6][7]
Ádám Makkai commented on Zollman's translation of Attila József's poem For My Birthday: "All but one translator have failed at the passage Én egész népemet fogom / nem középiskolás fokon / taní-tani! His name is Peter Zollman; this is how he solved it: I’ll teach my nation one and all / much greater things than what you call / college knowledge."[8]
It was thanks to him that the Anglophone world became acquainted with the poems of Dániel Berzsenyi, Attila József, Dezső Kosztolányi, Ágnes Nemes Nagy, Ottó Orbán, Sándor Kányádi, and István Baka, among others. In addition, he translated Csongor and Tünde by Mihály Vörösmarty, Laodameia by Mihály Babits and Duke Bluebeard's Castle by Béla Balázs.
One of his most significant works is his translation of János Arany's poem The Bards of Wales, which formed the basis for the eponymous composition of Welsh composer Karl Jenkins' cantata, performed to great acclaim in the UK and Budapest.
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